Life in France seen through the round window of a straw-built grand design.

Willkommen Bienvenue Welcome

Welcome, gentle readers.

This is an everyday tale of regular folk, who moved from Sheffield to the deepest Corrèze in France Profonde and thence to the rather more cosmopolitan Lot in search of something… different. We certainly found it.

The Lot is an area of outstanding natural beauty. Reputedly, a famous TV globetrotter was asked where, of all the places in the world he had visited, he might return to. He answered, ‘The Lot’.

Fans of Channel 4’s Grand Designs will know that we built a somewhat quirky straw bale house-with-a-view here in the Lot, not far from the celebrated Dordogne river. You can read all about it in my book, Bloody Murder On The Dog's Meadow, or watch the re-runs of the programme on More 4, or view it on You Tube.

After a break in the proceedings to write a book or two, this blog now takes the form of an everyday journal. Sometimes things happen, sometimes they don't (but the art school dance goes on forever). I hope it will give you an entertaining insight into what it's like to live in a foreign country; what it's like in the slow lane as an ex-pat Brit in deepest France.

I shall undertake to update this once or twice a week, unless absent on leave. Comments always welcomed, by the way, but I do tend to forget what buttons to click in order to answer them.

Sunday, March 29, 2015

24–28th March: Pulling Gardens

Sometime during the week, I went dutifully to the mairie to fill in the form that gave me
permission to burn all the brambles I've been dutifully uprooting over the last
couple of weeks. The road winds down the Côte de Mathieu, as it's called, via a
series of hairpin bends. At the sharpest of the bends, I caught sight of a
poster on a tree. It advertised the French national garden-pulling championships.

Driving back up from the mairie with my signed authorisation, I wanted to find out more, but
had to content myself with a glimpse in the rear-view mirror. I couldn't read
where or when, but there was a photograph of a horse in profile. So garden-pulling must have something to do
with horses.

I remember wincing when I first saw a poster to advertise
a ball-trap. A TV drama – called, I
think, Ball-Trap on the Côte d'Amour –
cleared up the mystery. It was a drama based around a group of people on a
camping holiday in Brittany who were tangentially involved with a clay-pigeon
shoot.

Just recently, I've noticed when walking our reluctant dog
that the three stocky horses are back in the triangle of scrub land where the road
to the farm joins the road that runs along the crest. I'm guessing that they
must be here to eat as much grass and hay as they can manage to build up their
strength for the garden-pulling
championships. They are mighty creatures with legs like tree trunks and great
barrel chests, but several hands less high than a British shire horse. Daphne
cowered when all three came trotting towards us to see whether I'd got any
carrots for them. I had to explain that I was saving them for a Gujerati-style
carrot salad.

So then, it seems likely that the gardens are pulled by
these shire – or we should properly say departmental – horses, but this doesn't
address the degree of difficulty involved. Pulling a garden must be the equine
equivalent of a triple salchow with double pike and twist. Or that fearsome
wall that all those posh show jumpers in hard hats or peaked army caps would
try to negotiate in the jump-off against the clock. (It's symptomatic of a very
misspent youth that I should have wasted precious time watching something
contested by double-barrelled people, in which I wasn't the least bit
interested. Maybe, like the hurdles, it was something to be negotiated in order
to get to the juicier bits of Sportsnight
With or Without Coleman.)

Presumably, the type of garden has to be standardised in
terms of dimensions and shrubs, paths, number of sheds and other outhouses and
all those kinds of details. It would be very unfair if departmental horse A only
had to pull an English-style manicured garden with just a few neat flowerbeds if
departmental horse B had to pull a rambling chaotic affair like ours, with a
bank and willow bushes and fruit trees and woodpiles and so on.

In fact, there are so many unanswered questions. How do
you detach the garden from the house, for example? And, if you manage to do
this, how then do you attach – by rope or by chain? – the full perimeter of the
garden to the horse? Is it a race, with horses lined up side by side, each
pulling its garden frantically towards a finishing line? Or is it a matter of
each horse – plus horticultural load – going through its paces to earn points?
And what about the judging? Is it done by one individual or by a panel of
arbiters? Personally, I'd favour a panel.

I missed a golden opportunity to find out more about garden-pulling at the Fête de Bret on
Saturday night. Bret was celebrating his 51st birthday, but I turned
up later than usual, having been seduced by the idea of a candlelit dinner at
home to see out Earth Hour. It was amazing how quickly an hour without music
and electric light passed. We enjoyed some stimulating conversation over a very
leisurely meal cooked by The Daughter. After clearing up more leisurely than
usual, I took off for Bret's soon after 9:30.

Ensconced behind his laptop to score a soundtrack to his
party, my friend and host greeted me with a new hairstyle to mark the occasion.
Normally, he just creates some facial hair fantasy, but this time he had shaved
the entire left side of his head. The music always makes conversation a little
challenging at my time of life when your hearing's not what it used to be. But
I had a good chat with Kate about dual languages (apparently, the tongue in which
you instinctively count represents a bilingual person's stronger language); and
with Anna about the dilemmas of putting your child through a very psycho-rigide educational system; and
with Natasja about shamanism; and with Steve and Jessica about their recent
short trip to Lisbon.

But I completely forgot to ask French friends there if
they could cast light on garden-pulling.
And once the big and little hands were pointing to 12, knowing that I would
lose an hour during the night, I simply had to get back to the comfort of my
bed. This always presents a dilemma at parties here. Do you sneak off or do you
say your proper goodbyes and risk tarrying an extra half hour? My exit was a
half-assed compromise. And I was punished for it when I couldn't drive my car
off the muddy verge. I had to go cap in hand and fetch my American friend,
Steve, who knows all about these things. He and his mate Steve managed to
liberate the Berlingo without too much difficulty. The secret, apparently, is
to use second gear and to make sure that the tyres are pointing straight ahead
and not at the angle I had left them.

I did find time to ask Bret about his hair. How would his
clients react to having someone who looked like Arthur Brown (of the Crazy
World) try to sort out their computer problems? Fire! It takes you to burn... Actually, he'll probably shave it all
off to encourage a strong new growth. Which is probably how the roots of all
those brambles I hacked off at the base will react.

There's a point... I wonder whether there's time
before the championships begin to contact the committee to propose a new team
event. Link up three or four of the mighty departmental horses, say, and attach
them to the stubs of all our brambles, then get them to pull them away from
here for good. Forever. A significant degree of difficulty, but a potential to
score heavily with the judges.

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Camp Street

About Me

Born in London, raised in Belfast, further-educated at Exeter and Sussex universities, I'm a professional dilettante, a family man and tireless dog-walker. You can listen to Lost & Found, my monthly radio show on www.expatsradio.com and check out my author page on Amazon.